Entertainment

Sorry, Amazon: 'Man in the High Castle' is more cringeworthy than bingeworthy

You'd have to look in castles high and low to find someone more excited than I was about the prospect of Amazon's new series, The Man in the High Castle, which debuts on the company's streaming service Friday.

I'm a huge fan of alternate histories like the Philip K. Dick book on which the series is based. The Hugo Award-winning 1962 novel depicted a broken America, 15 years after its defeat in World War II. The nation has been divided between Imperial Japan on the west coast and Nazi Germany on the eastern seaboard, with a neutral zone in the Rockies.

At the same time, I'm not one of those people who insist that a screen adaptation must be a faithful replica of the book. Especially not in this case — because, to be honest, not a whole lot of stuff actually happens in the novel. Large chunks are devoted to descriptions of Dick's favorite hobby at the time he wrote it (jewelry making), as well as his favorite divination method (the I Ching).

In short, there's a lot of promise in a TV show that promises to explore this chilling, alternate post-war world — especially when it's led by producer Ridley Scott, the first person to have successfully brought one of Dick's notoriously difficult stories to the big screen (the 1982 classic Blade Runner, which was about as far from a slavish adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as possible).

The first episode of Man in the High Castle, released last year as part of Amazon's pilot season, was very promising indeed. Unfortunately, the next five episodes — which is all Amazon allowed us to review in advance — manage to squander that promise, thanks largely to turgid plotting, pacing and dialogue.

The season may not be dead on arrival; it does pick up significantly in episode 6. But after struggling through the dull, confusing and unrelentingly grim story so far, I can confirm that this is going to be a hard show for anyone to binge-watch.

I hate to say this, because the show looks great. A lot of work has gone into its set design, costumes and cinematography. If you were to watch it with the sound off, you would believe every shocking aspect of this drab, muted, militaristic version of 1962 America. My only complaints about the establishing shots of Japanese San Francisco, Nazi New York and the broken-down neutral town of Canon City — the three main settings — is that we don't see enough of them.

The problem is in the story. Many of the characters and their relationships are contrived, both boring and confusing. Too many protagonists make too many baffling decisions. Too many important events are mysteriously forgotten after a single episode. Too much of the script makes about as much logical sense as fascist ideology.

The first and major problem is the MacGuffin, a film nerd's term for the object that drives the plot. Traditionally, MacGuffins don't have any value to the viewer — think of the maltese falcon, or the stolen data tapes in Star Wars. They're important purely because they're important to the characters.

But in the case of The Man in the High Castle, the MacGuffins should be more important to us than to the protagonists. They're newsreels of footage from our world, the one in which the Allies won the war; the newsreels are marked with a bible quote, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy." When we see them, all we see are choppy images — G.I.s on beaches, Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin meeting, the U.S. flag being raised at Iwo Jima.

We know what these images mean without any narrative. The characters should not. "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" was in Dick's version, too — it was an alternate history book within an alternate history book that imagined the Allies winning the war. The characters all thought it an interesting thought experiment, if a little unlikely. Dick emphasizes this for us by making some of the book's details a little off — Roosevelt isn't president in 1940, for example — so that we start to doubt the "real" timeline too.

In the TV show, however, multiple characters have seen the newsreels and instantly believed in their reality for no real reason that the show cares to explain. It simply has Juliana Crain, the first to discover the footage, say "I know things can be better" any time she's asked. (Alexa Davalos has to go into melodrama overdrive to sell that line...which is unfortunately true of a lot of the actors and nearly all their lines.)

Writer Frank Spotnitz is an X-Files alumnus, so he likes to keep explanations in check. In this context, however, if we're going to buy that the newsreels are important to the characters, we need more — a compelling narrative, maybe. A film within a film.

If the footage is this important, it also has to stay this important. Later on, we're supposed to buy that Juliana walks away from Canon City without learning anything about the all-important Man in the High Castle, for whom she has been couriering the films.

She then returns to San Francisco and tries to cover up for her absence. It's as if Dorothy had dropped her friends off at the gates of Oz and waltzed back to Kansas without really caring to meet the wizard; it's way too obvious a way for the story to postpone its conclusion.

It's not the only plotting or pacing choice that will have you furrowing your brow. Juliana's sister is killed in front of her by the Japanese, but barely gets mentioned again; her boyfriend Frank Frink's sister is killed by the Japanese, and the grieving stretches over three episodes. News of Frank's sister's death in captivity gets around, but a major political figure is shot in front of a crowd of thousands and the authorities manage to keep it quiet.

Then there's the Bible, which has apparently been successfully eradicated from American society — to the point where it's not even safe to own one in the neutral zone. (Historically, the Nazis couldn't even succeed in replacing the Church in Germany, let alone stamp out the world's most popular book.) As we learn that, we also see a Nazi spy casually playing "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday — a far more rebellious message in this context.

Many scenes, especially those inside the Japanese government building, simply risk boring us to tears — not to mention the caricature of a drawling western bounty hunter who shows up in Canon City for a couple of episodes. Our protagonists fail to kill him several times when they have the chance. He's really hard to take seriously.

Times Square under Nazi rule.

Image: Amazon

Nazis, by the way, are really, really bad. I'm not sure if you knew this, but life under them is grim. The show goes to extreme lengths to tell us this (rather than show us), to keep its tone dark and its characters constantly sad. At some point, it'll make you want to point out that even Schindler's List had jokes. Even during the darkest hours in human history, we've been able to blow off tension with gallows humor.

And people have also found ways to accommodate every oppressive regime. Dick's A Man in the High Castle was in large part a novel of manners about San Franciscans struggling to be more Japanese; this was a clever inversion of the norm that made people think differently about race. In the TV version, the most racist epithets come from the mouths of San Franciscans, who make the show's Nazis look tame.

The Nazi obsession with race is surprisingly, perhaps disturbingly, absent in their language on the show. The historic scale of their human carnage is too much avoided. In the first episode, we see a horrific pall of ash fall on Joe Blake's drive across America, from nearby "hospital" ovens. In the sixth, a couple of Nazi officials briefly choke down their guilt over past actions with tumblers of whiskey. In the book, there is much mention of a horrific genocide in Africa. In the show, there's nothing. It's hard to escape the feeling that the bad guys have been somewhat sanitized.

In place of such necessarily nasty world-building, we get lousy melodrama. Protagonists get angry and push each other a lot, and turn away from each others' affections — Frank Frink especially. You'd hardly know Rupert Evans was a renowned Shakespearean actor for all the times he has to say, or react to, the cringeworthy line "get the hell away from me!"

Platforms like Amazon are supposed to give showrunners the freedom to take risks. Yet this show's dialogue makes it sound like a run-of-the-mill network drama.

Is it worth getting past the first five episodes? Maybe. Episode 6 is a surprisingly good return to the form of the first episode, as it largely focuses on the home life of Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell, far too absent from the rest of the show). We get to see a lot more, and believe a lot more, about how the American Reich operates. And it ends on a heck of a good cliffhanger.

We'll post a second review after Amazon releases the full batch of episodes. In this darkest timeline alternate universe, after all, things can only get better.

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